December 8, 1963 a day like any other.
At Alldinga Beach, the annual South Australian
spearfishing championships are set to begin.
23 year old Rodney Fox,
a life insurance salesman from Adelaide,
and former champion, takes to the water.
He sets his sights on a large reef fish.
Little does he know that he himself is being stalked...
By a great white shark.
Through a series of near miracles,
Rodney Fox arrives at Royal Adelaide Hospital in under an hour.
The vascular surgeon there has just returned
from an international conference
with the very latest in surgical techniques.
They go to work on the mutilated body delivered to the operating theater.
The shark has punctured his left lung, left clavicle, and diaphragm.
The jaws have bitten through all his ribs,
gouged skin and muscle from his left side,
and exposed several major organs.
According to one surgeon, had Rodney arrived five minutes later,
he would have bled to death.
Sewn back together with over 450 stitches,
he lies bedridden for two months with the pain,
and the awful memory.
Do you hope to continue skindiving one day?
I'll get in the water somewhere sometime,
but I don't know whether I'll go in this gulf here where
there's been two or three attacks in the last few years.
That was Rodney Fox then...
And this is Rodney Fox now.
Seldom has a single event so radically transformed a person.
In a way, the great white shark that attacked him
30 years ago took his young life but gave him another.
In three decades, Rodney Fox has grown from a fearful shark victim
into a shark champion and protector.
I think that sharks
and the shark world is really beautiful and interesting.
The shark gets a raw deal, and people just hate it
because they don't understand and they fear it.
I love to see them flying and gliding through the water,
and I think that most people would really enjoy it too,
if the realized they weren't going to be eaten alive.
This from a man who was himself nearly eaten alive.
Rodney's life since the attack has been a continuous challenge
to overcome his fear by facing it.
Today, documentary filmmakers and marine scientists
from all over the world
travel to Australia to go looking for sharks with Rodney.
His knowledge of living sharks is unparalleled.
Marine biologist Eugenie Clark
People who hear about Rodney's shark attack go,
wow, he's an ordinary man like one of us
and yet he'shad such a terrible experience,
and on top of that,
he's telling us that sharks aren't dangerous,
they're good, we should preserve them.
So this is what's so wonderful about Rodney,
the someone who suffered through such a terrible incident
can now defend the animal that attacked him.
It wasn't always that way.
Reliving the shark attack story has been a continuous epic in my life.
So many people want to hear how I survived,
how I stuck my fingers in the shark's eyes,
how I put my arm around it so it wouldn't bite,
and how I went up to the surface and it followed me.
And after about eight or nine years of telling the story,
I read the original Readers' Digest First Person Award the
I had written immediately afterwards,
and I found that I had changed the story a little.
I was telling people what they wanted to hear,
and not necessarily the truth.
Time often affects memory.
Here the story is only two days old, and not nearly so heroic.
All I remember is this big thing pushing me through the water,
and it seemed to let go a bit when I pushed my hand up at it,
and it still wouldn't let go.
The pressure of the water might have been holding me in his mouth.
And I managed to put both arms right around him
and I was looking for his eyes with my fingers and after awhile,
he managed just to let go and
I managed to get to the surface.
Very luckily there was a boat just coming over to see what was going on
because there was so much blood and disturbance in the water.
And they quickly rolled me into the boat and I had to keep both arms
just like this so they wouldn't rip my arms off.
As they came to shore on this incredibly rough area there,
they drove the boat up onto the shore.
And they loaded me onto a bit of a stretcher, and a car,
the only car in the whole area that had been in this beach
for about four or five years was available,
and they drove it out over the reef with 10 or 20 guys lifting it
over the big lumps and the rocks through here.
Loaded me in the back of it, took off toward Adelaide.
It was an absolute miracle,
especially when they unloaded me out of the boat.
As they did, my wetsuit slid open and my stomach,
actually, loops of intestines, came out which seems funny now.
I've got a good friend who actually tells me every now and again
that he stuffed them back in with his fingers.
They bunched me up.
Rodney's wife ay.
I didn't know how bad it was for many days afterwards,
but by then he was up and breathing and talking and so,
you know, it's only later
when they tell you all the things that were wrong
that you realize just how close it was
But everybody in the hospital thought he was dying
but I knew he wasn't.
His attack drew worldwide attention.
Rodney became a sensation almost overnight.
The public notoriety would set his life on a brand new course.
Three months after the attack, escorted by ay,
Rodney began his return to the sea.
But it wasn't easy to forget his attack.
The fear of the sharks when I went back in the water was huge.
My first time my head went underwater,
I imagined in my mind sharks running in from all directions and I said,
"stop it, you've got to control that."
Things would never exactly return to normal for Rodney.
His love of the sea was now overshadowed by a terrible fascination
with his old nemesis the shark.
In 1965, he organized the first expedition to track the great white.
The adventure became a docudrama.
But danger in the unknown makes man himself the quarry
of the most savage hunter of the deep
the great white shark
the white
great white death.
Come on you bastard, attack.
This is some of the first footage ever shot of a great white under water.
Coming in
now!
That doesn't taste so good, that wire mesh.
The theme is revenge a crusade to rid the seas of evil sharks.
Death and the battle's almost over,
a second maneater who's jaw will never again menace an unsuspecting swimmer.
In those days, people feared sharks
because they knew very little about them.
They thought that every shark was a bad shark
and there was a big saying
at that stage that the best shark was a dead shark.
The first film was followed by a second.
"Attacked by a iller Shark" is about Rodney his attack and recovery.
Again, it shows Rodney wielding a speargun, bent on revenge.
Time out to reload.
The cartridge inside the head explodes on contact.
The tremendous concussion is transmitted into the body,
killing instantly.
But it does twist the truth just a little.
I wasn't really after revenge.
What I was frightened of was going back in the water
and being bitten again.
And so I was quite keen to try out the new explosive powder head
that had been invented.
And I went underwater and I shot some of these sharks on file to
show that man could protect himself underwater.
Rod's on a killing frenzy,
intoxicated with his successes overriding his fears.
This is exactly the scene he had been in need of.
In fact, Rodney's attitude was beginning to change
a fact obscured by the dramatic film script.
I didn't realize or understand much at that time but I thought,
that's not the right attitude.
We've got to look at it further than that.
We've got to learn more about them and understand them
and learn to live with them.
As Rodney's appreciation for the great white began to grow,
so too did his expertise as a shark tracker.
In 1969, he was called into work
on a shark movie unlike any that had gone before.
Has that cage been checked out?
Film Producer Peter Gimbel
turned to Rodney to deliver the sharks for his cameras.
Well, generally, after they've had a taste,
they start really to tear into things and really start to be active.
And then you'll let us get into the water.
I'll push you.
The result the critically acclaimed documentary,
"Blue Water, White Death."
In the crew was diver cameraman Stan Waterman.
The two men would become lifelong friends.
There's gotta' be 12!
Oh, yeah.
Rodney had already done two films about the great white
and Rodney probably knew more about
how to chum in the great white very important that,
chumming, the putting out of what was called burley
in Australia to attract them.
So that Rodney was the natural man to set up the scene for us.
Rodney didn't have a cage back then.
Gimbel had the cages.
Rodney knew where to find the burley, the chum,
and set up the boats.
And way back then, in the beginning,
Rodney was your man in Australia if you wanted to film the great white.
Sorry about you cage, fellah, wait 'ill you see it.
How bad is it?
What a mess.
He bent the cage, Stan?
Oh, wait 'till you see.
The carnage of earlier films was not repeated.
"Blue Water, White Death" marks the beginning of a new kind of relationship
between white sharks and human beings
one that allows the sharks to survive the encounter.
For Rodney Fox, the occasional filmmaking stint was not enough
to support his young family.
So he took up abalone diving, a dangerous but lucrative profession.
It would put food on the table for 18 years.
But always, the sharks weighed heavily on his mind.
One of the hardest things to do over that
18 year period when I was abalone diving
was when I had to return to abalone diving the week
after I'd been out filming sharks.
We had attracted maybe 10 or 15 great whites
around the boat during the week period.
We had them biting on the cages and taking baits
and showing these enormous teeth.
When the film crew had left and everything had quieted down,
I had to make my living again, and go back in the water
only a few miles from where we'd seen all these sharks.
I had to put on another hat and say to myself,
Sharks don't like abalone.
They generally don't eat humans. You'll be okay.
But the first couple of days
I imagined those sharks were looking at me.
And sometimes when my knee would hit a soft sponge,
I wondered whether that was a soft shark's belly
and whether it was biting my leg off.
But I knew that it was fear in myself.
The danger to abalone divers was genuine enough.
Some of the best abalone beds were near seal colonies
where white sharks liked to hunt.
But instead of killing the sharks,
Rodney and his colleagues designed
a protective working cage for the abalone divers.
Then they tested it in shark infested waters.
Watch out for that... Hurry up! Break a leg!
It really proves that the cage is safe to abalone divers
because you've been involved with five sharks down
here swimming around, attacking it,
and they've only taken the hose.
And if you've got enough air to survive
and you can get up to the surface,
you'll be safe.
Makes the adrenaline pump, doesn't it?
The adrenalin really started to pump in 1974
when Rodney was contracted to coordinate
the filming of live sequences
for the greatest shark film of all time.
He had had experience with filming great whites in the wild,
but "Jaws" was a different kind of project.
They had sent over a small stuntman, a midget diver and a small cage
so that the sharks would look bigger because Jaws,
of course, Bruce was a 25 footer and our sharks were only 14 foot.
And as we were dressing the little guy
one of the sharks came in and grabbed hold of the propeller on my boat
and actually shook the boat physically
and it was well over 14 feet long,
and a very strong shark, and as it swam along the side,
I'm saying to Carl, Quick, get in the water, get in the water!
The cameraman's ready, here's the shark,
and he kept saying, No, no, no!
The stunt diver wasn't the only one who didn't want to go in the water.
"Jaws" was great entertainment, but the public was terrorized,
and the perception of sharks went from bad to worse.
Nobody realized at that time that it was going to be a horror film
that was going to frighten so many people,
including a lot of my friends, out of the water.
I had people say to me,
I wouldn't even go in the bath now after seeing the film Jaws!
For Rodney, "Jaws" was the turning point
the moment he finally realized that the sharks needed a champion.
And so he set out to debunk the old myths.
He started a business an expedition business taking filmmakers, scientists
even tourists out into the South Australian seas
for face to face encounters with the real great white sharks.
These days, his business serves two ends
it contributes to marine science
and it satisfies Rodney's rather large appetite for adventure.
Some experience, I'll tell you!
This scientific expedition will drop anchor in the Neptune Islands
off the rugged coast of South Australia to find, film,
and study great white sharks.
Rodney's son Andrew has taken over the necessary,
if noxious, chore of mixing the key ingredients of burley
a kind of foul stew that sharks seem to find irresistible.
Blood, ground tuna, and a little sea water that's the recipe.
Andrew will create a smelly slick stretching several miles
down current from the vessel.
Any sharks in the area will find the invitation very attractive.
Marine scientists from the University of Adelaide want to test
the strength of a great white's bite,
and to identify the telltale sings of shark attack for forensic purposes
a grisly but necessary study.
The sharks must be induced to bite a specifically designed pressure plate.
First, they need to be worked into a biting mood.
Ready now?
Okay, drop her in, Andy.
Now that the shark has the idea, he gets his tuna on a plate.
Eep it in the air anyway, because he's a bit cranky!
Running tests on the great white sharks in the wild is always unpredictable.
We should have an impression on plate!
The plate is designed to measure pounds of pressure per square inch.
That is amazing.
We're looking at the test strip now and that looks as if...
This one is 500 kilograms, 1,000 pounds.
One thousand pounds.
That one's more than 1,000 pounds.
A thousand pounds per square inch enough to puncture metal plating.
But what exactly is it that draws a great white and prompts it to bite?
Is it the smell of prey, or the sight of it,
or the vibrations it sends through the water?
That's a crucial question for divers
so Rodney helps set up another experiment.
What I hope to do here is to really work out
whether the great white sharks are interested in humans,
whether they can actually see that there's an unseen shield there,
whether they may be interested in fish or sound
Just to see what they are interested in.
They swim around and around so many times the cages without biting
and haven't had any true results.
In order to test sight, Rodney will use a cage of quarter inch
Lexan plastic to give the sharks a clear view of his shape.
An underwater speaker will test for sound,
broadcasting low frequency vibrations to simulate the vibrations
made by moving prey.
A thawed tune will provide scent.
Will the sharks show any clear preference?
Which one will attract them the most?
The adrenalin that rushes in you as you go down there
and as the shark comes in when you're in the Lexan tube
gives you a real rush that excitement all over again.
It's like the first time in my shark cages.
It's exciting and my heart you can feel it a little higher
in you beating a little faster as you realize that
you are part of an experiment,
that the sharks don't really know whether or not
they can get at you or not.
It was quite unnerving really, because I felt like I was naked
in the middle of the street in the shop window with everything exposed...
Again and again, the circling sharks pass Rodney by,
and return to the source of the sound vibrations.
The proof is clear at close range, underwater vibrations,
not sight or smell, are what attracts the shark.
Rows of sensory cells along the flank are especially attuned to these stimuli
Well, there's absolutely no doubt in my mind they're far more interested
in the low vibrations than they ever were in me
or the tuna...
The more Rodney has studied them,
the more he has come to learn about sharks,
the great variety of sharks all 370 species of them.
I get lots of pleasure from looking at the different species of sharks,
from the carpet shark that lays on the bottom with its frilly mouth
to the nurse sharks that seem to rummage around and sleep a lot
to the beautiful whaler sharks and the bull sharks and the silkie sharks.
There's so many of them the mako sharks and the great white sharks.
All of them have a different feel,
a different way to swim, a different way of life.
But they're all beautiful the way they swim and glide
and fly through the water.
And the biggest and most mysterious of all: The whale shark.
It's not just the largest of the sharks
it is, in fact, the largest fish in the ocean.
But despite its menacing size and appearance,
this is among the most gentle and benign of all sharks.
It eats plankton, not people.
Few in number, slow to reproduce,
the whale shark is one of the great and vulnerable wonders of the oceans.
Whale sharks to diver have been
one of the greatest pinnacles of sharks in all the oceans of the world.
They were the largest shark, they were a docile shark,
they were a shark that you could hitch a ride on,
a friendly shark, all the things that the great white shark wasn't.
Growing to over 50 feet and 20 tons,
the whale shark is so big that it supports other fish, like these remora.
They hitchhike harmlessly on the whale shark
and eat the food it leaves behind.
Ironically, the most visible fish in the ocean
is also one of the least understood.
No one can say where or when these sharks reproduce,
or even how old they grow to be,
but some scientists believe they live as long as we do,
Roaming the tropical ocean in search of food and occasionally, each other.
Now imagine a shark this big with teeth to match
a massive, meat eating predator.
At one time, such a shark did exist:
Caharadon megaladon 50 feet of carnivore
lived during the miocene ear some 20 million years ago.
It was the largest ocean going predator that ever existed.
Rodney traveled to South Carolina to find out more about the megaldon.
He and naturalist Vito Bertucci
will dive in the Cougar River off Charleston.
It's a dangerous dive.
But this was a hunting and dying ground of cacharadon megaladon
and his fossilized teeth lie embedded in the river bottom.
The most important thing to worry about here
is just to work you way into the current
and down the anchor line and then once we get down,
you have to be aware that there are sharks
and turtles in this area and an occasional alligator,
and if you do come up on one,
not to be startled by it and if you ignore them, they usually ignore you.
Alligators, the only danger with them is on the surface.
If you see one come at you at the surface,
all you have to do is dump your air and go down.
And they won't come after you.
The sharks, if they come up to you,
just give them a shove and they'll take off.
Well, I got my knee pads on for praying
I hope this turns out alright. Here goes.
The water is cold. Visibility is nil.
The darkness is decidedly spooky.
I had some incredible images of monster sharks swimming around.
In these gloomy water,
a monster carnivore would be right at home.
Within minutes, Rodney finds the first traces of these ancient killers.
Luckily, of course, it's the teeth, not the shark.
You okay?
Yeah, why?
I dunno' if I can get up here very easy.
Just leave your gear on the floor.
How do I get this helmet off?
I feel a bit like Hoodini.
Why are they different colors?
This one was in the sand.
On the sand?
Yeah, it the sand and these were in the mud.
You know, when I was heading down there with you for the first time,
I thought, "what am I doing here?"
It was dark and crazy and I'm pulling and I'm spinning sideways
on the rope down there and it was only when I saw the bottom come up slowly
that I realized there was a steady bottom there
and I thought, "I cannot give up now because I gotta' get back in the boat."
And then I went on and then when I saw
that first half a tooth down there I thought,
"Ah, this is worth it."
And then I started looking, looking, and I forgot about all the problems
that you told me about down there and started
looking, looking, looking for teeth.
And, you know, you can get carried away.
Down in Jacksonville, Florida, Dr. Cliff Jeremiah is taking Vito's
fossil teeth and reconstructing a megaladon shark jaw.
It will be the largest shark jaw in the world
big enough to swallow a small car.
And it has an entire set of properly matched teeth.
It has taken Vito 19 years to collect the full set.
Some 200 fossilized teeth will line the recreated jaw,
adding almost 300 pounds in teeth alone.
Shark teeth, of course, stand out so much that white pointy ivory
things knives against their gray body.
And of course, if you had somebody in a room pointing a revolver at you,
you would look at the revolver too,
because it's the sharp pointy end,
the point that's going to cause all the trouble.
Shark teeth are compelling.
It's difficult not to admire them and react with a shudder.
The only part of the shark's skeleton that's not cartilage,
these razor teeth are used to dismember and devour prey.
But despite our worries, only rarely is that prey human.
First of all, the word shark is such an enormous pull on people.
Sharks three or 400 varieties of sharks in the world,
all go together as one name shark and that spells out fear.
Research was done and shows that the word shark
had a higher reaction on the nervous system of people
than any other word in the English language.
And so the general public, when they talk about sharks,
they talk about something they cannot understand and something they fear.
In fact, sharks are not all scary.
Only a handful are any kind of threat to people.
What they are is vitally important to the oceans.
As top predators,
they help maintain the entire balance of the underwater world.
Rodney's fascination with these great hunters
has taken him all around the planet.
His quest: To learn still more about sharks,
and it's quest that never ends.
Alright, we're gonna' place the mask on and the way to do that
is to put your chin in first and then we'll pull this strap over the top.
Here at Walker's Ca in the Northern Bahamas,
Rodney and Dr. Eugenie Clark have come to swim with reef sharks in the wild.
On this dive, Rodney and Eugenie are wearing special masks
that allow them to communicate underwater.
No metal cages, no Lexan tubes, just a swim alongside the sharks
to show that if you know what you're doing, you have nothing to fear.
They've picked a dive center where frozen fish remains are put out
to lure large numbers of sharks for the divers.
It's just beautiful to be here and watch them.
The nurse sharks are the first to arrive.
They certainly don't seem to be paying any attention to us, do they?
What sort of food or fish do these nurse sharks normally eat?
The nurse sharks eat the food on the bottom shellfish,
clams and any kind of fish they can get ahold of.
Genie, he's eating your hair.
Watch out!
They're trying to eat your hair, Genie.
Trying to eat my hair?
I really like that, Rodney.
He just stopped then and wanted to be scratched...
While the nurse sharks are fairly docile,
the blacktips that follow are much more aggressive.
That one just tried to bite me on the camera...
How about staying close to me?
It's getting a bit exciting here.
How many species do you think we're seeing, Genie?
Well, it looks like three species for sure
the gray reef or the reef shark, as it's called in the Caribbean,
a lot of these nurse sharks, and then the blacktip.
I don't know if there are two species or one of the blacktip.
Yet, even the blacktip and gray reef sharks
seem more interested in the food than the humans.
There are almost 80 sharks feeding simultaneously.
And for the most part, they simply ignore the divers.
Funny how when we're down here with them, the way we are now,
we've both stopped feeling that there's any danger at all
in the situation we're just so fascinated with watching them.
In fact today, people threaten sharks more than sharks threaten people.
Sharks are being killed
sometimes purely out of hate they don't even use them.
In some of the shark tournaments, they just go out and kill sharks.
But I think we're getting away from that.
There's too much now on television and magazine articles and books
and people like Rodney Fox who are...
telling people what good sharks can be and who are living examples
of how, if you understand a shark, you can go on swimming with them,
and they are not to be feared and hated.
They're like puppy dogs, aren't they?
Some sharks you can swim with, some you can't.
It takes some education, experience,
and common sense to figure out which ones are safer than others.
Silkie sharks, for instance, are on the safe list.
And with silkies, there's a twist,
as Bahamian Stuart Cove will show Rodney.
And when we go down there, you're going to twist its tail?
Yes. It's important when we're swimming around with sharks
to keep our hands down,
because they do have teeth,
but when they swim by us, if we grab their tails and twist them gently,
it will paralyze the shark and when you do that,
you can actually roll them over and stroke their bellies.
We use this maneuver to actually remove fish hooks
and so we sort of do the sharks a little bit of a favor
and we remove the fish hooks and it doesn't seem to bother them.
Paralyze the sharks and then release the sharks,
they'll come right back to you and you can do it again.
Well, I'm game. Let's try it.
Silkie sharks are so called
because instead of the usual rough shark skin,
theirs is smooth as silk.
Reaching up to nine feet in length, they inhabit the waters off Nassau,
to the south of Walker's Cay.
Grabbing silkies by the tail might sound tricky,
but divers in the area have been doing it for awhile,
ever since they first set out to remove the hooks of careless fishermen.
That's when they discovered the silkies' special weakness.
It's called tonic immobility,
and it's a quirk of the sharks' nervous system,
a kind of temporary paralysis,
brought on by twisting the sharks' tails and flipping them over.
I don't believe that. Those sharks are so friendly.
They're right behind you. They're all around...
It's incredible.
I've never experienced anything like that before.
So silkies are friendly. Nurses are okay.
What about any others? You got any others?
We've got no dangerous sharks in the Bahamas.
Unfortunately, two weeks ago,
we had a longline boat come into our area and target our shark dive,
up in the reef area on the inland sites
and caught 35 of our shark population and they had different names.
They were like our kids.
It was like having your pet dog killed.
And we had a great affinity,
a great affection for all these wonderful sharks.
Well, after that great white shark got me,
I really knew nothing about sharks.
This is one of 350 varieties of sharks in the world.
And you just have to find out which ones are potentially maneaters,
or manbiters, as they say.
I'm less frightened now than I was before my shark attack,
because I've learned to find out which ones are dangerous
and which ones aren't,
which ones you can handle, which ones you can swim with.
I think they're beautiful.
Hi Joe
Felicity, Margaret
boys and girls,
many different shapes and sizes. Come on.
It's my belief that education will stop
this massacre of all the sharks and the massacre of our oceans.
There's a great upwelling amongst people now to say,
Hey, let the sharks live, let's learn more about them,
let's find out how we can enter the water without
having to kill them all off.
And it's the education of our younger people now
and I see a large uprising of it young six and seven years old saying,
Don't throw any plastic in the water, don't do this,
why are you killing that shark,
why is that photograph of a dead shark?
It's really great to see that we are starting to let our seas live.
For Rodney Fox, the past 30 years have been a journey,
a journey with the shark.
It was a voyage that started in one terrible instant,
a voyage into the face of fear.
Over 30 years, Rodney has traveled from terror and death
to understanding and life,
from the early days when killing sharks seemed right,
to the present when harming them, even accidentally, seems very wrong.
In a way, he was chosen on that awful day 30 years ago
to speak for the sharks,
chosen for a special lifelong bond.
For while the great white would put one mark on his body,
the next 30 years would leave another on his soul.
Thirty years ago, I had no idea
I'd be dragged into a whole lifetime of the study of sharks.
And when I look back now, I realize and feel quite proud
that I've worked with so many interesting people.
And what I've tried to do over that period of time
is to get the respected filmmakers...
and the scientists that know what they are talking about
to learn more about the great white
and get them to portray that the shark isn't a bad shark,
that we have to learn to live with it, and not just kill it.
And I look back over the 30 years to find
that slowly it's been happening and working
and all of the people agree with my philosophy:
"Let the sharks live!"